Ubuntu Hardy: Setting up VMWare-tools from the CLI

First you need the vmware tools tar from the cd image. This is found at /media/cdrom once you've run "install vmware tools" from the server console. When I did this the CD didn't seem to be available even though it looked like it had mounted correctly. To get past this I simply grabbed a copy of /usr/lib/vmware/isoimages/linux.iso and extracted the vmware-tools tar file from there.

Note it's not totally necessary but I ran this after upgrading the system to the latest kernel - these optional steps are as follows:

To fix this you need to use the open-vmware-tools to create the kernel modules and then install the vmware tools as normal. The problem was solved on the vmware forum: and this fix was then neatly wrapped up on the "Et Cetera" blog.

Installing VMWare-tools on Ubuntu Hardy Heron from the Command Line

Note: These instructions were carried out on kernel 2.6.24-19-server.

First install the headers for your kernel these are needed for compilation:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Now install the following dependency requirements and install the open-vmware-tools: